Gum on My Shoe

As regular readers will know, I recently bought a new pair of glasses . I couldn’t be happier but there were a few issues at first. New glasses can lead to headaches until your eyes adjust. The frames sit differently on my face too and I had some pain across the bridge of my nose as they settled into place. They’re fine now but for the first week or two I occasionally reverted to wearing my old glasses for a few hours. Doing so was a trade-off between seeing clearly, and seeing less clearly but with less discomfort. It got me thinking about how life is often a compromise between caring for some aspects of our health and wellbeing at the expense of others. The trick is not to ignore any one aspect for so long so that it becomes critical. It’s an ongoing challenge to keep all my plates spinning, to borrow an analogy from my friend Maya. If you’re unfamiliar with the reference, check out this video of plate spinning maestro Erich Brenn. My plates are many and varied but I can grou...

I’ve felt below par mentally for a while now. It’s possible I’ve been depressed, although I’m wary of self-diagnosis and haven’t sought a clinical opinion. I can trace some of it back several years but I’ve only lately felt up to talking about it publically. It’s not that I’ve ignored my mental health altogether. I’m aware of many of my triggers; the situations and events that tend to pull the rug out from under me. I captured the main ones in my Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) back in 2019, and review it periodically. My triggers include: Changes in relationships (which I tend to perceive as lessening, loss, or abandonment) Uncertainty or lack of clarity in communications Getting overwhelmed by competing demands for my time and attention My triggered responses include feeling anxious and panicky, a strong sense of loss or abandonment, and becoming either pushy or clingy. My WRAP includes recovery strategies which help me return to my baseline, such as talking things ov...

I took a drive with a friend the other day. It was the first time I’d been in a private car in over a year and the first time my friend had driven me anywhere. She has yet to pass her driving test and I was there to supervise so she could gain additional practice. We had a great time and I felt completely at ease in the car with her. Thinking about it afterwards, it occurred to me how important safety, trust, and responsibility are in our lives. Trust and Physical Safety I was supervising but I was very much in my friend’s hands. I trusted her driving ability and sense of responsibility. If she felt confident behind the wheel, that was good enough for me. No matter how experienced we may be, every driver understands what’s at stake when we start the engine and pull out into traffic. We are responsible not only for our own safety but that of our passengers, other road users, and pedestrians. Many of us drive so frequently we take this for granted but it’s worth reminding ourselves...

And I might be okay but I’m not fine at all. (Elisabeth Wagner Rose / Taylor Alison Swift. “All Too Well.”) I wrote recently that I’ve never felt part of any group or collective, even those to which I’ve felt the strongest of attractions. As painful as that’s been, does it really matter? So what if I don’t belong to the tribe of writers and poets I’ve met in the past few years? There’s no lasting harm in discovering I’m not a performance artist! Some exclusions, however, are more perilous. Being excluded from my local recovery college for having no lived experience of mental illness was completely justified, but it left me feeling permanently estranged. If I began displaying symptoms of mental ill-health I’d almost certainly play it down. Not from shame, but because I’d be afraid people would think I was faking it, or exaggerating things in order to “join the club.” The irony is, even with a diagnosis I’d probably still feel I had no legitimate right to be there. I feel a fra...

In my recent article 11 Things I Am Grateful for This Week I revealed “I’ve been experiencing a good deal of stress lately one way or another.” I thought it would be useful for me — and hopefully interesting for others — to explore what was going on for me at that time and how I handled things. Why Was I So Stressed? I sometimes get stressed about work or relationships, but this time the trigger was discovering the hot water tank (immersion heater) at home had stopped working. Looking back, I can see there were several strands to my stress and anxiety. The first was the immediate, practical issue of not having any hot running water and having to find someone to deal with it. I have a poor track record finding reliable tradespeople. I felt under pressure to engage someone who would do a good job for a reasonable price. There were several other plumbing jobs which needed doing about the house, including drippping taps in the bathroom and kitchen, and a kitchen was...

I rarely feel the need to record my self-care habits, but from time to time I find it helpful to monitor things a little more closely. For the past ten days Fran has been staying with a friend in Arizona, after which she will visit another friend in Florida. Apart from a few days in between, she will be away from home for almost six weeks. Although we stay in touch, vacations inevitably mean we are less in contact than usual, which can be hard on us both. I’ve also had a few things going on in my personal life that have affected me deeply. At such times it’s is all too easy to slip into feeling low, so based on my Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) I decided to use a wellness tracker to keep me in touch with healthy practices and activities. My Wellness Tracker Spreadsheet I first tried this back in 2013 when Fran took an extended trip around Europe. On that occasion I used a Google Docs spreadsheet and recorded brief notes about what was happening each day, how much exercis...

It’s been quite a week, one way or another. At times I’ve been as low and despairing as I have in months; at others I’ve felt grounded and whole. Here are ten things I’ve learned about myself in the process. Maybe some of them will resonate with you too. 1. Things Are Shitty Sometimes It’s rare for me to feel so low, stressed, or overwhelmed that it interferes with my day-to-day life. Mostly I move through upsets and difficulties fairly smoothly. But sometimes even my tried and tested strategies for making it through bad days fail me. The best thing I can do then is accept I’m struggling. That’s not easy, because my life is generally stable and secure. I have a home, a family, a job, financial security, amazing friends, and decent health. What is there for me to feel overwhelmed by, anxious or low about? I’m aware of the danger such thinking presents, however. “I’ve no right to be struggling” stops people seeking the help they might need. So yes, my life gets shitty too someti...

There’s nothing inherently wrong with having a bad day. It’s natural, I would even say healthy, for our mood to fluctuate in response to whatever is going on around us. On the other hand, no one wants to stay stuck in a rut. Here are ten techniques I use when I’m having a rough day. Several of them feature in my Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) . It’s worth saying these are not fixes or solutions for anxiety, depression, or other mental health conditions although they might form part of a person’s wellness toolbox. They help me weather the ups and downs of life and I offer them on that basis. 1. Go for a Walk I’ve written elsewhere about how important walking is to my wellbeing. It’s my go-to strategy when things are getting me down. Walking allows me to acknowledge whatever feelings are present for me, experience them, and then let them go . I sometimes use the “hot coals” technique I learned from Fran. I close my hand at my chest, taking hold of whatever feeling I wish...

When I’m happy, I walk. When I’m sad, or lonely or lost. When I’m hurting, or numb. When there’s too much to think about Or nothing on my mind. I walk. Walking has played an important role in my life for as long as I can remember. So much so that it was one of the first things I included in the wellness tools section of my Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) . It’s also made its way into my writing more often than I’d realised until I began writing this article. (The idea for this piece came to me whilst, wait for it, walking into work one morning a few weeks ago.) My family never owned a car, so when I was growing up in Liverpool if I wanted to go somewhere it was catch the bus or walk. From the age of eleven I walked thirty or forty minutes each way to and from school, lost in my thoughts about whatever was going on for me at the time. In my late teens I remember going for Sunday evening walks to West Derby village and back, a round trip of maybe an hour and a half at my ambli...